Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Barber Lightfoot

Lightfoot stacks his negatives like sandbags against panic: no misgiving, no shrinking back, no calculation, no terror. The cadence is pastoral but also tactical, a drill-sergeant rhythm disguised as consolation. Each clause names a common refuge of the anxious mind - hesitation dressed up as prudence, arithmetic posed as wisdom, fear masquerading as moral seriousness - and then forbids it. The rhetorical trick is that he never argues you out of doubt; he outpaces it.

The key word is "calculation". For a Victorian theologian watching faith get cross-examined by science, industry, and an increasingly bureaucratic public life, calculation is the modern temptation: to treat conscience as a cost-benefit analysis, to wait until the odds feel safe. Lightfoot’s line refuses that entire moral economy. If grace is a "gift", it can’t be earned, optimized, or responsibly delayed. You either accept it or you don’t. That binary gives the listener a strange relief: the burden of managing outcomes is explicitly taken off the table.

"Tomorrow" matters too. It makes the promise immediate, almost liturgical, like an Advent exhortation or a sermon aimed at a community on the verge of decision. The subtext is that courage is not a personality trait but a stance produced by surrender: frank acceptance replaces strategic self-protection. He’s not inviting reckless action so much as trying to unhook action from fear of consequence - a radical move in a culture that prized respectability and restraint.